This disclosure relates generally to the field of computer application management using a blueprint and deployment model. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, this disclosure refers to a method and system for comprehensive provisioning and management of computer applications in a dynamic Business Service Management (BSM) environment while additionally addressing change tracking of configurations, incident management, application compliance, application monitoring, and process management.
In today's corporate computing environment vast amounts of computer resources (e.g., storage, processing capacity, network infrastructure) may be available to corporations. Also, certain business services are either supported by or made available through internal and external computer resources. Internal resources can include computing capacity connected to an intranet and external resources can include internet based resources made available on demand to a subscriber (e.g., cloud computing resources).
One goal of a corporation's information technology (IT) management is capacity planning. Capacity planning, in a computer system context, is a discipline to ensure enough resources are available to handle a maximum amount of workload at a given time without requiring the corporation to purchase and maintain excess computer resources. Capacity planning is typically performed using both historical data about computer resource loads and forecast data pertaining to increases in use of business services or business applications.
Another goal of a corporation's technology management relates to BSM. At a very high level, BSM can be thought of as abstracting the actual information technology infrastructure (i.e., IT components) so that a view can be presented reflecting performance of a business service without regard to the actual IT components used to support the business service at a given point in time. For example, IT components often have built in redundancy so that if a single component fails a redundant component can take over on the fly resulting in no direct impact to a business service being supported by the particular IT component that has failed. In other words, a primary goal of BSM is to manage the business at a level less concerned with the technical nature of the IT components supporting the business. Also note that an IT component can refer to an actual hardware component, a software component, or a combination thereof.
Because of the complexity of today's corporate computing environment, it would be desirable to create a model driven approach to many of the aspects of systems management. Prior art provisioning techniques can be very manual and time consuming processes. As such, they can also be error prone and not necessarily repeatable in a reliable manner. Additionally, many organizations are struggling with knowing what applications are used by whom and for what purpose.